Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

Every living thing on Earth bears traces of the big bang. As the Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “We are all sprung from celestial seed.” Every person on Earth is “gravitationally held on the same 12,742-kilometer-wide wet rock hurtling through space,” explains Bill Nye. “There’s no option to go it alone. We are all on this ride together.”16 The vastness of the universe puts our earthly concerns in proper context. It unites us by a common human spirit—one that has gazed up at the same night sky over the millennia, seeing for trillions of miles into the stars, looking thousands of years back in time, and posing the same questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going?

We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. “We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world,” Yuval Noah Harari writes, “than on trying to understand it.”11 We look for the step-by-step formula, the shortcut, the hack—the right bag of peanuts. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown.

Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

“The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”

Science, as George Bernard Shaw said, “can never solve one problem without raising 10 more problems.”26 As some gaps in our knowledge are filled, others emerge.

Scientists stand “at the edge between known and unknown,” physicist Alan Lightman writes, “and gaze into that cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened.”28 Instead of freaking out over their collective ignorance, they thrive on it. The uncertain becomes a call to action.

Many of our excursions into the unknown are reversible. As business magnate Richard Branson writes, “You can walk through, see how it feels, and walk back through to the other side if it isn’t working.”31 You just have to leave the door unlocked.

“Scientific knowledge,” Feynman explains, “is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”

“Discovery comes not when something goes right,” physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn explains, “but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected.”49 Asimov famously disputed that “Eureka!” is the most exciting phrase in science. Rather, he observed, scientific development often begins by someone noticing an anomaly and saying, “That’s funny …”

As Warren Buffett put it, “The five most dangerous words in business are ‘Everybody else is doing it.’” This monkey see, monkey do approach creates a race to the exceedingly crowded center—even though there’s far less competition on the edges. “When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”

As Einstein said, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor.

As the quote attributed to many luminaries says, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

To cut is to make whole. To subtract is to add. To constrain is to liberate.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. —albert einstein

“Pure thought,” Einstein said, “can grasp reality.”8 Thoughts can disprove an argument, show why something will or won’t work, and illuminate the way forward—all without a single physical experiment.

Fantasies, as Walter Isaacson writes, can be “paths to reality.”

Even when it’s idling, the brain is still active.33 “When you’re staring into space,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes, “your brain consumes only slightly less energy than it does when you’re solving differential equations.”

If you live with the question long enough, “you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer,” as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote.

“To create,” biologist François Jacob said, “is to recombine.”59 Decades later, Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Scientists are the idealistic truth seekers trying to understand how the universe works. The engineers, on the other hand, are more pragmatic. They must design hardware capable of implementing the scientists’ vision, while grappling with practical realities like finite budgets and schedules.

“Intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence,” the researchers observed.

The process of creation can be embarrassing. “For every new good idea you have,” Asimov writes, “there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.”

At the initial stages of idea formation, “the pure rationalist has no place,” as the physicist Max Planck put it. Discovery, as Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”

As Stanford business professor Justin Berg writes, “Convergent thinking alone is dangerous because you’re just relying on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble what succeeded in the past.”

To Feynman, impossible didn’t mean unachievable or ridiculous.42 Rather, it meant “Wow! Here is something amazing that contradicts what we would normally expect to be true. This is worth understanding!”

“Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong,” Sam Altman writes. “If not, they would have faced much more competition.”

Pure idealists don’t make for great entrepreneurs. Consider Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of all time. “It’s a sad, sad story,” Larry Page, Google’s cofounder explains. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research.”61

“As for the future,” Antoine de Saint Exupéry once wrote, “your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.”

Instead, it’s a combination of optimism and pragmatism—the sheer audacity that combines starry-eyed dreams with a step-by-step blueprint for turning the seemingly unreasonable into reality. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

A problem well defined is a problem half solved. —unknown

In the end, the study confirmed a statement attributed to several world chess champions: “When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”

“Every answer,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says, “has a question that retrieves it.”11 The answer is often embedded within the question itself, so the framing of the question becomes crucial to the solution. Charles Darwin would agree. “Looking back,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.”

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” said Werner Heisenberg, the brains behind the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.13 When we reframe a question—when we change our method of questioning—we have the power to change the answers.

“The best response to false beliefs,” the researchers concluded, “is not necessarily providing correct information.”

As psychologist Robert Cialdini explains, “It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.”

“Nothing in the physical world seems to be constant or permanent,” physicist Alan Lightman writes. “Stars burn out. Atoms disintegrate. Species evolve. Motion is relative.”37 The same is true for facts. Most facts have a half-life.

The history of science, as clinician and author Chris Kresser says, “is the history of most scientists being wrong about most things most of the time.”

If there’s no way to test a scientific hypothesis and disprove it, it’s essentially worthless. As Sagan explains, “Skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments, and see if they get the same result.”

Bohr and Einstein turned to each other to stress-test their opinions because the men were too close to their perspectives to see their own blind spots. “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”

This is also why disagreement is built into the scientific process. “Progress in science,” theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler says, “owes more to the clash of ideas than the steady accumulation of facts.”

“The road to self-insight,” psychologist David Dunning said, “runs through other people.”

In a well-designed test, outcomes can’t be predetermined. You must be willing to fail. The test must run forward to shed light on uncertainty, rather than run backward to confirm preconceptions. Feynman said it best: “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”4

The reason for this approach is well summarized by a Sufi teaching: “You think that because you understand ‘one’ that you must therefore understand ‘two’ because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand ‘and.’”10 Components that otherwise function properly may refuse to play nice with each other after assembly.

Man errs as long as he strives. —Goethe

A moratorium on failure is a moratorium on progress.

These failures are what business school professor Sim Sitkin calls “intelligent failures.” They happen when you’re exploring the edges, solving problems that haven’t been solved, and building things that may not work.